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The Art Market in the Southern Netherlands in the Fifteenth Century Author(s): Lorne Campbell Source: The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 118, No. 877 (Apr., 1976), pp. 188-198 Published by: Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/878374 Accessed: 05-01-2019 07:22 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Burlington Magazine This content downloaded from 35.176.47.6 on Sat, 05 Jan 2019 07:22:28 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms EDITORIAL has never had the slightest intention rest, and at a time whenof pricesdoing were relatively full low. justice, in an almost sociological way, to Butthe having variety conceded the Tateand a point range they never of made, 'art' in our time. we may still question whether it is their job to be up to the The Tate believe that they should be up to the minute in minute with their purchases. They show no desire to docu- what they buy. And here they do have a point although they ment our time, so they have not this excuse for blankets and failed to make it. Instead of invoking the incomprehensi- bricks. The situation has radically changed since the 1930's. bility of Constable - and surely the analogy Constable/ Now that the avant garde has become respectable, there are Andre was a little far-fetched? - they would have received a plenty of places where the latest thing can be seen, at Arts more sympathetic hearing from a well-educated audience, Council Exhibitions, at the ICA, in dealers' galleries. There had they cited the case of the Museum of Modern Art in is no longer the same need nowadays to risk freezing in a New York, which over decades courageously acquired all permanent, public collection a mass of effective and showy the latest confections, with the result that, although no work which may well be regarded in a few decades as trash. doubt saddled with much junk, they have achieved two More potent still is the view that, in the management of valuable objectives: first, they have documented the imagi- public collecting in England in 1976, the old criteria of native productions of our century, in a way that will prove personal conviction and taste, based on the interaction of of inestimable value to historians, whatever our grand- sensibility and experience, have no substitute. Even if this children may come to think of some of their acquisitions qua may mean that we shall allow some prize to slip through our art, more effectively than any other institution; secondly, as fingers, surely this is to be preferred to the spectacle of a a result they now have in their possession some considerable 'Rip van With-it' who views every turn in the whirligig of works of art, acquired as it were by chance along with the style with a wild surmise? LORNE CAMPBELL The Art Market in the Southern Netherlands in the Fifteenth Century A study of almost any aspect of early Netherlandish sometimesart irritatingly laconic and almost always obscure in should begin with a lament that the documentary evidence their wording, and may be fully interpreted only by someone available is sufficient to support only the vaguest of general who is both a skilled economic historian and a practised statements. Paradoxically, what documentary evidence linguist is well versed in the terminology and workings of available has been insufficiently exploited by art historians, fifteenth-century legal systems. Sadly I can claim to be and this neglect applies particularly to a group of legal neither; but I hope to be able to draw from this material documents concerning the organization of artistic produc- some indications of how the art market functioned. While tion: guild regulations and records of lawsuits involving my principal concern is with painting and painters, I have artists.' Such documents are often unbelievably prolix, found it convenient to touch on tapestry, sculpture and manuscript illumination, for which the evidence is often less sparse. As the fifteenth century is an arbitrary chronological The following abbreviations are used in the footnotes: division, I have discussed early sixteenth-century evidence A.R.B. = Acad6mie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de when it may cast light on fifteenth-century practice. My Belgique, A.S.E.B. = Annales de la Socite' d'Emulation pour l'itude de l'histoire et des antiquites main object, however, is to exploit the published docu- de la Flandre/Handelingen van het Genootschap gesticht onder de benaming 'Socie't mentary evidence in an effort to show how pictures were d'Emulation' te Brugge, sold and bought in the southern provinces of the Burgundian B.C.R.H. = Compte rendu des seances de la Commission royale d'histoire, ou Recueil de Netherlands during the fifteenth century. ses Bulletins, B.N.B. = Biographie nationale de Belgique, I.A.D.N.B. = Inventaire sommaire desarchives dipartementales ante'rieures a 79o, Nord, i. The Sources of Demand Archives civiles, serie B, ed. A. LE GLAY, C. DEHAISNES, J. FINOT, etc., Io vols., Lille In all probability the principal Netherlandish employer [1863-1906], M.G.O.G. = Maatschappij van geschied- en oudheidkunde te Gent, of painters was the Burgundian court, which retained a R.B.A.H.A. = Revue belge d'archeologie et d'histoire de l'art, varying number of artists as court painters and which also VAN EVEN = E. VAN EVEN, 'Monographie de l'ancienne 6cole de peinture de intermittently provided temporary work for a great many Louvain', Messager des sciences historiques [1866], pp.1-55, 241-338; [18671], pp.261-315, 439-97; [i868], pp.454-86; [18691, pp.44-86, I47-95, 277-34I. painters.2 Both the permanently and temporarily employed 1 As far as I am aware, only two studies have been devoted to the organization of artistic production: E. BAES: La peinture flamande et son enseignement sous le rigime des confrdries de St-Luc (M6moires couronnis et m6moires des savants 6trangers publids par l'A.R.B., LIV, fasc. 6), Brussels [1882]; and H. FLOERKE: Studien zur niederldndischen Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte, Die Formen des Kunsthandels, methodically. Both authors, however, made extensive use of the notorious das Atelier und die Sammler in den Niederlanden vom 15. - z8. Jahrhundert, Munich Ghent documents which are now known to be forgeries, and quite a consider- and Leipzig [1905]. Neither author devoted much space to the fifteenth century, able amount of documentary evidence was overlooked by Baes or has been and Baes mingled flights of imagination with discussions of documents without published since his book was written. citing in any systematic way the published sources on which he was drawing. 2 See the extracts from the Burgundian archives concerning works of art and Floerke relied heavily on the material assembled by Baes, and presented it more artists collected and published by L. DE LABORDE: Les ducs de Bourgogne, Seconde I88 This content downloaded from 35.176.47.6 on Sat, 05 Jan 2019 07:22:28 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms THE ART MARKET IN THE SOUTHERN NETHERLANDS IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY painters seem usually to have been Bruges and engaged elsewhere, and for on theatrical decorative entertainments; or work: banners for ceremonies and to designmilitary sculptures and expeditions, tapestries.7 and decorations for banquets, theatrical The patronage entertainments of individuals is much less well documented, and funerals. Though some rooms infor now the we must Burgundian turn from the evidence palaces of accounts and were elaborately decorated with relatively paintings informative - like inventories the to'Jason that of wills and the Chamber' at the Castle of Hesdin, occasional described starkly concise by inventories Caxton3 compiled - for use in tapestries were still the most favoured certain legal form transactions. of wall decora- tion, just as metalwork was the most The aristocratfavoured Marguerite form de of Lannoy, small Dame de Santes, scale ornament. The Burgundian collectionswhose will is dated of 1460, tapestries clearly owned and a small number of metalwork were probably unrivalled, religious paintings. but Evidentlythe Burgundian she did not think very highly accounts contain very few payments of them, forfor she picturesbequeathed them and mainly the to the wives of Burgundian inventories contain exceedingly members of her household; few mentionswhile her noble relativesof pictures.4 received manuscripts or jewellery.8 Almost nothing, how- Churches, convents, hospitals and episcopal palaces were ever, is known of the activities of the Netherlandish nobles obviously decorated with religious paintings and sometimes as patrons of painting. More can be ascertained of the tastes with portraits, of ecclesiastics or of the ruling princes. Some of high-ranking ecclesiastics such as the Canons of Cambrai of these were commissioned by the church authorities,5 but Cathedral, whose wills and executors' accounts are pre- perhaps most were the gifts of individual clerics, of pious served together and several of whom owned pictures. One laymen or of confraternities.6 The civic authorities occasion- was the composer Guillaume Dufay, who died in 1474 and ally commissioned religious paintings and, more rarely, who owned a portrait of the King of France, a painting of an portraits, to decorate the chapels and assembly halls of civic unspecified subject, another of the Crucifixion and a fourth of buildings, and Last Judgements or Scenes of Justice for their the dance called the Moresca.9 Pierre van der Meulen, Dean court rooms.

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